Documenting The Sales Process (Part 4)

Investing in a sales methodology, like Sandler, TAS, or Challenger is always a good idea as your sales organization grows because it provides a common vernacular across the organization and establishes a base for how selling should work across the organization, including what is acceptable and not acceptable. Before you do that, know your sales process & write it down step-by-step.

If you aren’t ready to invest in a sales methodology or can’t find one that fits your organization’s culture, make sure to create your own. You can build a presentation or document that outlines how you expect reps to run sales cycles, what information they need to capture about deals, and how to forecast and negotiate.

Need help selecting or building out your methodology? What you sell and how you sell it will naturally lend itself to different sales methodologies.

Protip: If you are investing in a sales methodology, make sure that you don’t underinvest. After getting comfortable with the program, work with the organization to create a rollout plan that will work. Without enough training, they may deploy it poorly and provide a bad selling experience.

We can’t cover them all here, so please contact our team for guidance on selecting your sales methodology.

Before you even select a methodology, it’s important to document the steps in the sales cycle, as they are laid out in your CRM system. Why?

When you do select a methodology you can apply the right elements to different phases of your process.

You might also find when you document your process that you need to make some changes.

New hires will ramp more quickly if they know the expected sales process they need to execute.

Include in the documentation:

How do you enter this stage? What has to happen for the deal to be at this step?

Who is involved in the stage?

Also, create a visual of your ‘typical’ sales cycle for new people to understand what the steps usually are and how they flow together. Here’s a sample below.

Your task: Document your sale process and create a visual of a typical sales cycle. Make sure to validate it with the sales team.